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Skyrim, but VR!

Deuce

Outer space potato man
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Started playing around with Skyrim VR on the PC, with the HTC Vive. My first impression: This is not for the novice gamer/PC user. Many games suffer from the issues with porting a Mouse/Keyboard/Controller game into a VR platform, and Skyrim is no different. What Skyrim does have going for it is a very active modding community. I've had to do a ton of tweaking to get the game properly playable. The default graphics and control settings are downright awful.

Couple quick videos of my early attempts:




Took a bit to get my "VR legs" as well. Like a lot of VR games, there's a teleport option for movement. Less motion sickness. But that's weird and immersion-breaking, so I've been working on regular movement. It's tough, I definitely get disoriented sometimes. Especially when I kneel down (to active sneak mode). My brain seems to handle the "walking" better when I stand upright, kneeling down I damn near fall over sometimes.

Melee combat is even jankier than other stuff, so I've been sticking to spells and bows. Going all Emperor Palpatine like you see in the Barrows video is hilarious, I cackle like a maniac. (shooting lightning out of both hands) I love that the aim of each spell hand is independent too, you can't do that with the mouse/keyboard version.

I still need to figure out how to tweak the UI some more. The health/stamina/magicka bars don't seem to have a consistent location to appear in, and are too transparent.

A huuuuuge help is a mod that uses an external voice recognition program to take commands for spells, shouts, and other actions. My mic isn't recording in these videos, so you don't hear it, but "flames left" causes the flames spell to equip to the left hand. (and that's why you hear the microsoft sam voice say "equipping flames to left hand") Sadly, the control input is still required to actually cast the spell. Man oh man would I love to just be able to shout FUS ROH DAH in my living room and have it actually cast the shout.

Lots of work to get going, but overall this is pretty freaking cool.

edit: those little short, turning jumps are an unfortunate requirement of the headset's cabling. You hit a button to rotate your character. (I have the increment set pretty low, but you can get it to spin 90 degrees at a time if you want) The natural reaction is to physically turn yourself, but if you keep doing that eventually you're going to be wrapping yourself up in cables, or yanking things out. I can't wait for the wireless adapters for these headsets to mature.
 
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One thing recording my own POV makes me realize is just how many small head movements people make. The eyes automatically track whatever we're looking at, stabilizing the image in our own brains. But a fixed "camera" like this VR headset flails about with every twitch.
 
One thing recording my own POV makes me realize is just how many small head movements people make. The eyes automatically track whatever we're looking at, stabilizing the image in our own brains. But a fixed "camera" like this VR headset flails about with every twitch.

Yeah, I've seen people run the videos through image stabilization to correct that, but I see no point if you aren't trying to make money from recordings, and some people move so much that image stabilization ends up looking like tunnel vision. But then tunnel vision would be a fairly accurate presentation of the VR experience.
 
I love Skyrim. I love the idea of VR.

And I hope they work the kinks out, and produce something with the immersion of Skyrim, but plays as well as a keyboard and mouse.

Or at least close.
 
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